Home Truths

So, Derby. My new locus operandi. (When searching for a phrase, make one up.) Recently described on Sky Sports as ‘the most central city in the UK,’ it is very slightly more interesting than that makes it sound. Obviously I still know very little about it, but here are some little observations I have so far made.

Derby has two cinemas (they both showed Serenity quite adequately). It has the two ends of the supermarket spectrum, Morrisons and Sainsburys, but not much in between. The Oxfam in town sells Fairtrade tropical juice, which I adore. There is an acceptable number of charity shops, all with books for me to browse through. I don’t know if the library is any good, as I am putting off joining until I have a permanent address, but I do know where it is. Derby is an old-fashioned sort of town and still has an Assembly Rooms. I am fairly certain I have previously mentioned the Honda motorcycle dealership owned by Bob Minion, but I feel it could bear to be mentioned again. Derby thrived on the railways (it is a rail hub, much like Crewe) and hence is full of a) red brick terraced housing and b) decrepit ex-industry. It has an inner ring road and an outer ring road, neither of which quite complete a full ring. The river Derwent runs through Derby, but mostly the town turns its back on it and walls it in with concrete. I think there is a (possibly ex-)canal somewhere because I have seen cycle track signposts that mention one. Derby’s football team are Derby County, known as the Rams (wool was, I think, another staple industry in ye olden days), and they have one of those eternal rivalries that football teams from nearby towns so often develop with Notts Forest. The stadium is called Pride Park, which is a silly name. Derby has many little suburbs which are ex-villages…ones I know of include Alvaston, Wilmorton, Crewton, Sinfin, Allestree, Osmaston, Markeaton, Littleover, Mickleover, Peartree and Chester Green. There is a road called Traffic Street. The shops in the city centre are reasonable – an HMV, a Waterstones…what more do I need? On the way back into the city tonight I found out from a road sign that Derby is twinned with Osnabruck – I have no idea why, especially as Derby is one of those cities that doesn’t really feel city-sized…I seem to make a habit of living in them, as Oxford was another.

The M1 goes by a few miles to the east and, from what my car radio tells me, has an accident on every morning. Every weekday I drive from Derbyshire south-west into Staffordshire, down the A38 towards Birmingham, to go to work near Burton-upon-Trent, a singularly uninteresting town except that they make Coors and Marmite there. Next to Burton is Branston, where they make the pickle. This is the Midlands proper. Derby itself is slightly hilly, but to the north-west is what most people would think of as Derbyshire proper, with the peaks, Matlock, Mam Tor and Chatsworth all within reasonably easy reach by car. To the south-east is Nottingham, which turns out to be rather cooler than I thought it was (and has digital cameras for the purchasing), and then Leicester, near which my grandparents live. To the north-east…I haven’t been that way yet. But I know that up north somewhere are Sheffield and Leeds and eventually York…one weekend I’ll go a-driving up the M1 and find out.

There. Now you know about as much about Derby as I do.

The wind blew strong, and summer's song, it fades to memory...

No-one ever wished anyone else a merry autumn. The words just do not go together. Autumn…is a strange beast to me. I know that almost everyone else (northern hemisphere everyone else, at least) has commented on it on their blogs lately, and I swore I wouldn’t follow suit because I dislike even really deigning to notice autumn. But I want to know what it is about the season that seems to captivate people so.

Spring I understand, to a certain extent. The joy of seeing the first snowdrop, the buds on the trees…beginning to remember what it’s like to actually feel any warmth from the sun. Summer…basking in that warmth, the sheer joy that comes from blue skies and wisps of white cloud, and the colour abounding everywhere. Deepest winter…there’s a thrill to it. The ferocity of the cold, the unforgiving beauty of ice and snow, the knowledge that this is as bad as it gets but you can survive it and toast your feet by the fire.

But autumn…mists and mellow fruitfulness? Perhaps, but to me that is more late summer. By the time the leaves drop, the last fruit is long gone. And mist is pretty, yes, but fog is not. The leaves turning can be beautiful, but unless you’re very lucky they don’t last long on the ground before the rain turns them into yucky brown mush. And even if not, all you’re left with are bare branches against a grey skyline. The clear, crisp days are pretty, but seem washed-out and far too short in comparison to the lazy summer days still recent in your memory – they are not yet as precious as they will be by January. You begin to need the heating on in the house, and you are unable to sleep with the window open any more because the wind keeps rattling it.

The wind…the wind may be the key. There is something very exhilarating about the first wind in a long time. A day of heavy rain where the trees groan and lose twice the amount of leaves in an hour that they’ve lost in the previous week. Going out into it and feeling it fight you, feeling the life that comes from the freshness of the air. For the first time in many months, wondering just how secure the slates on your roof are…and hearing the wind howl over the top of your chimney.

So maybe that’s it. In summer, the weather tends to feel…dead. Your plants may be thriving and new life sprouting all around, but neither a clear sunny day nor a grey cool day really exhilarates you. The sun may make you feel happy, but it doesn’t fight you (other than in a nasty underhand skin cancer way). Summer offers no resistance. Winter, of course, is all about resistance…is about hiding ourselves away in our burrows and toasting our crumpets until the beautifully frozen lawn thaws once more. But in summer we get lazy, we take the world for granted.

Do we need the autumn to wake us up again?

In Memoriam

Geoff first entered our lives when I was the tender age of 10. My mother and I had been away for a weekend for my mother’s birthday, in mid-November, and we had left our two cats to roam free, with some food left for them in the garage. When we came back we discovered that the garage had developed the addition of a small black and white kitten, who did not so much miaow as go ‘meeeh’ in a very plaintive way. We brought him into the house and for some reason sat with him in the bathroom for a little while – possibly finding out if he was friendly or something. We also introduced him to our 6-month-old puppy, who seemed to take an immediate motherly liking to him…well, where ‘liking’ means treating him as another puppy and knocking him over.

Please do not ask me why the 10-yr-old me thought Geoff would be a cool name for a cat.

When we moved house the following summer, Geoff was the only one of our cats to really make the transition happily – Debbie and Squeak were both much older and more set in their ways. Debbie became mostly a house cat and Squeak wandered off after about 6 months never to be seen again (although my mother thinks she ran onto him on a dog walk several years later). Geoff, however, seemed more than happy at Braehead, and was soon discovered by the neighbours sneaking in through their cat flap and sharing the food of their doddery 20-yr-old cat Dennis. When Dennis died a year or so later, the neighbours acquired two new kittens. Debbie still ignores those two to this day, but Geoff developed friendly rivalry with them and I think banded together with them to repel other neighbourhood cats when occasion required. He regularly sat on ‘their’ garden seat, tea-cosy style, master of all he surveyed (or he certainly thought so).

He never did learn how to wash more than his front paws and face (and always looked ridiculously pleased with himself when he did think of doing that much). He often shed claws all around the house…how he grew them so fast I don’t know. He tended to purr when you were doing something that he wanted you to stop. For years we thought he didn’t like human contact, and didn’t like being patted, because if you tried he would just sit there unresponsively. Then, when I was home one holiday during university, I decided to see if I could make him like being patted, and succeeded a little too well. Once you got past his initial unresponsiveness, he would start to push back with his head…then fidget and push against you…and flip onto his back…and flip back again…and turn round and round in his basket…and finally get to a point where he wouldn’t accept you stopping. If you went into the next room and sat down and tried to read a book, he would follow you in and walk up and down your legs and push your book out of the way until you stroked him some more. When he got like this the only escape was to actually leave the house.

I still remember the look of fear on his face when Gigha had puppies and he had to traverse a dining room full of 5 cat-chasing puppies to get to his food in the kitchen.

Food was always a factor in Geoff’s life…he was very fond of sitting on the kitchen floor begging for scrap of anything you were cutting up…whether it was chicken or runner beans, he always seemed to think you were keeping something fantastic from him.

I could go on and on. But Geoff was put down on Tuesday because he had kidney failure last week, so all of it is now no more. Nothing remains but the memories, and the one or two photos (he was not the most photogenic of cats). So here shall a few of them be collected, to commemorate my Geoffy-boy in a small way.

“You do have a superiority complex. And you’ve got an inferiority complex about it.”

Seemed a very appropriate title for this one…

So here’s the dilemma.

On the one hand, I think I’m great. I believe my opinions on any subject are the correct ones, however ill-informed I am. It is rare that someone will argue me out of an opinion, and only a few people can do it. I think pretty highly of my own intelligence. Any mental talent I lack, I believe I could probably develop if I wanted to. Any physical talent that I lack – well, those aren’t my fault and who really needs them anyway? I expect to be the best at anything I actually care about. I re-read my own posts and smile at my own great turns of phrase.

On the other hand, I’m the schoolgirl who wanted to be friends with the cool people. I can’t see why anybody would want to be friends with me, and I will always find the reasons another person is better than me at anything. I don’t like appearing confident and will talk down my abilities. I don’t go out and search for the things I want in my life – that would be trying too hard. I tell myself that I don’t really want that much from my life, and I’ll convince myself that everything that has happened so far was for the best. I find other people scarily motivated and feel that I could never be that driven. I am not good at admitting I need other people. I would never, ever, say that I was someone’s best friend. I don’t think I ever have been.

So where does that leave me? Hopelessly adrift in my life but convinced that everything will work out great because, well, it’s me, and I’m great. Loving myself but unable to believe anyone else does, and every so often realising how much I love myself and hating myself for it. Convinced I can make friends relatively easily, yet under no circumstances ever thinking of myself as a popular person. Drawn to popular people, whilst feeling slightly superior to them, but very surprised if the popular people actually take notice of me.

Basically – confused. Is it just me, or do I make no sense at all?

(and even as I type that, Superior Me is making the case that this is the best way to be – that surely anyone who thoroughly understands themselves can’t be a very deep person…)

West of the Fields

So, for all those of you that don’t know – which is everyone except Kepp because I have been somewhat lax at announcing my life on the board recently – I went to Wales this weekend. Just for the Friday and Saturday nights, with a load of lads from my company…and lads who did work for my company but now work elsewhere…and their friends…bit of a loosely-connected group. But anyway the idea is to go and stay in a hostel for two nights, do some volunteer work on the Ffestiniog preservation railway during the days and get very drunk in the evenings. Most people are not hugely into preservation railways but go just for the fun of it.

I did go last year, when I’d only been with the company for just over a month, knew hardly any of the group (except the few Crewe lads who’d invited me in the first place), and found the extreme laddishness a little difficult to deal with. Still had enough fun to make me brave enough to venture back this year though. And this year was good – I felt much more like a member of the group and had a pretty good time, all in all. So, although I swore I wouldn’t use my blog as a diary, I will yet again succumb as I want there to be a little report of our activities to kind of sort it out in my own head (my paper-and-pen diary is currently buried somewhere deep in a packing box, and so here it shall be).

I left work an hour and a half early on Friday and was picked up by two guys who I vaguely recognised from the previous year but couldn’t have put names to. We proceeded to drive to Wales in an attempt at convoy with two other cars, but I think we spent far more time out of convoy and on mobile phones going ‘why did you go the other way?’ than we did able to all see each other. The car I was in was a very powerful sporty little thing and we did some rather fantastically scary slingshot overtaking on rainy Welsh roads which were far too narrow and twisty to allow it. I was, however, in just the right mood for daredevil driving after a day of being sat in front of the computer, and didn’t get even the least bit travel sick so just found it amusing. We got to Minfford hostel at about 7, having met up with the ‘supertruck’ en route – one of the guys works for a company that makes those huge boxy no-mod-cons trucks bought by people like the MoD, and owns several himself. He’d spent £100 on petrol just driving it up from Guildford…the man is insane. I admit it is pretty cool though. Now I go and google for it, it appears to be a variety of Pinzgauer.

That evening we went out for a rather unimpressive curry and truck guy tried to make me drink way more cider than I was capable of when that tired. I refused and he called me crap for the rest of the evening. But I can live with that. We ended up back at the hostel drinking yet more and bouncing uncoordinatedly to Supergrass until I finally gave up at about 2am and went to bed. There to be besieged by people with cider and shaving mousse (my sleeping bag was a good shield but now needs a wash) until they got bored and went away.

On Saturday morning there were an amusing number of hangovers present when we’d had our bacon sandwiches and assembled to do some work, and to the worst of these hangovers we gave the mattock. Kill or cure…and I think it cured as he never threw up. Basically our task for the weekend (well, there were two halves of the group, but the task of my half) was to lay track for a siding in the yard right by the hostel. This meant digging out holes for the sleepers, lugging the sleepers over and putting them in…taking them out again and digging the holes a bit better…then manoeuvring 85-foot sections of rail into place on top of the sleepers, attaching them together, fastening one rail down to the sleepers and then gauging and fastening most of the other one…and that was pretty much the end of Saturday. That description completely misses out the fights over who got to use the power tools, the incredible flexibility of steel rails, the black graphite grease we had to daub every fastener in, the digging through a wheelbarrow of fasteners to find the ones we could use, the torrential rain in the afternoon and Alistair writing ‘Jeff blows sheep’ in the condensation on the windows of the mess car we sheltered in. The Ffestiniog guy in charge of us was not called Jeff, his name is Andy, but he was called Jeff on Saturday and Dave on Sunday. This happened to him last year as well, when he got a bit annoyed – this time he just seemed resigned.

At about 4 the rain just got silly and we headed back up to the hostel for showers. I then sat and played cards quietlyish (ie drinking, but slowly) for an hour or two with a few guys before we all walked down into Porthmadog (40 min or so walk) and had food in the restaurant/bar which is at one end of the line and I think is part-owned by the railway. Bad food but we were hungry so we just drank more and ignored it. We then proceeded to a pub called The Ship (and/or Y Llong) where a pool table and a darts board were discovered and several local welsh-speakers were challenged to games…as far as we could tell they were being reasonably abusive about us in Welsh but then that didn’t really surprise us. That was at least one of the safer pubs in what is a very run-down and asbo-infested town. Walked back to the hostel at about 12 but this day I was just far too tired and went to sleep immediately upon return. Wish I hadn’t – it would have been fun to stay up – but I just couldn’t muster the energy to be at all interested in what was going on.

Yesterday morning there were yet more hangovers, although belonging to different people this time, and our group went back to shovelling ballast (that big gravel that lives on railway lines) onto our new siding. Not the most interesting or easy work. Luckily I only did that for about half an hour though before I was told I could spend the morning riding on the footplate of one of the steam engines as it towed the tourist carriages up to Blaenau Ffestiniog and back. So that I did – I shared the ride with one other guy so spent half the time in the guard’s van (which was a little uncomfortably full of trainspotting types), but the other half in the engine cab and it was fantastic. I was on the same side as the fireman (oil-fired so he didn’t have to shovel coal in, which I would have liked to have seen, but never mind), but the place I had to stand meant I was blocking two valves off from him and so I was put in charge of those two – letting water into and steam out of the boiler. Great fun. And fantastic to watch the fireman and driver constantly adjusting things, watching gauges, opening valves…I loved it. I now understand why people get sucked into trains. Proper old engineering with metal valves for everything and nothing automatic – you’re literally opening the valves to let things move around the engine and boiler, and you’re standing with the boiler in front of you and you absolutely toast…and if you’re not careful you burn yourself on something or close-to-boiling water comes streaming through the tiny front window onto you when the horn is blown. Great fun. This is a picture of the engine…on a slightly trainspottingy page, but you can ignore that. So yes, went up to Blaenau (where the temperature was several degrees lower) and back, just in time for lunch. We then spent the remainder of the afternoon shovelling yet more ballast and using pneumatic ballast tampers to settle it around the sleepers with. That was good fun to start with but got a bit monotonous – also ear defenders tend to give me a headache and my wrists are extremely inflexible and achy today thanks to the kick of the machines. Actually all of me is very achy but the wrists were the bit I wasn’t expecting from the weekend.

We called it a day at about 3 and drove back over to Derby (this is about a 4 hour drive, by the way) – I was in a different car this time and had the rather wonderful experience of discovering another REM fan in the car driver when he randomly played some. I had forgotten just how great it is to talk to someone who is a fan of something you love…actually no, that’s a complete lie, isn’t it? The board and many emails filled with little but Angel ramblings would certainly indicate otherwise. But I had forgotten how great is to just randomly come across another fan of something you love…and also I haven’t actually known another REM fan for the last 5 years. And this guy makes me feel normal by being even more into them than I am and swapping bootleg records on murmurs.com. So we pissed off the other guy in the car (who likes dance music, pfft) by discussing favourite tracks and good live versions for the last two hours of the journey. Very enjoyable – and also he gave me a spare cd copy he had of their MTV unplugged session and has promised me yet more bootlegs…it looks like my REM obsession may flare back into life again. Had to leave the car this morning just as Country Feedback was playing…I love that song so much.

Got back ‘home’ at 8pm and collapsed into bed as fast as I could without being rude. An excellent and relatively cheap weekend. Yay. And I shall stop there before I waste yet more of your day forcing you to read this drivel…